WOMANLY ART

"Black Lake" by Jane A. Barrow

The new show opening Wednesday at the University Museum contains no work by men.

"Contemporary Women Artists St. Louis IX," writes juror Lisa Norton, "represents art which 'throughout history...has been marginalized; left out of the dialogue and left out of the important museum collections.'"

All the work was contributed by members of the St. Louis Women's Caucus for Art, a group of women artists living within a 200-mile radius of the city.

In the view of Norton, an assistant professor of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the show does more than just present the work of women artists.

"This exhibition raises the rhetorical question of whether there exists a uniquely feminine esthetic," she writes.

The show will run through March 31. It is being underwritten anonymously by a Cape Girardeau couple.

In conjunction with the opening, a slide lecture titled "The Female Vantage" will be presented at 4 p.m. Wednesday at the museum. Speaking will be Pamela Decoteau, art historian, author and women's studies specialist at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

During the '70s, some women artists became so dissatisfied with the male-dominated status quo at the gallery level that they formed a group called the Guerrilla Girls. They printed posters of gallery statistics that displayed the inequalities that were occurring and, Katherine Ellinger Smith says, still are.

Today, those posters are collected, and women's art is being accorded more respect and space. But the art stars are still men, says Smith, an adjunct professor of art at Southeast.

She concurs with Norton that women's art seems to express a separate sensibility from men's.

"Women have a different experience, I feel that comes out in your work," she says.

A caucus member and past prize-winner in the show, Smith says the national organization called the Women's Caucus for Art was an outgrowth of the women's movement.

It was a reaction both to the disparity between the number of women and men getting into galleries and the lack of resources for women artists, she said.

The caucus helped "women that had time constraints, that had children or weren't part of a network or women who hadn't gotten an educational background in art.

"I feel very strongly that any woman in the arts should be part of this organization," Smith said.

Besides publishing a newsletter and calendar, the St. Louis chapter holds monthly meetings featuring a speaker whose work has been exhibited weekly. "They give you tips on getting your work out there," Smith says.

The caucus' resources were helpful in finding a professional photographer to shoot slides of her own work.

All levels of artists are welcome in the caucus, Smith said. "You're not put down if you're just starting out."

Some discussions of starting a local chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art already have been held, Smith said. Interested women artists are invited to call Smith or University Museum Director Pat Reagan-Woodard at the university.